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2026 Vol.8, Issue 2 Preview Page

Research Article

A virtualized DUT-in-the-loop test harness and a differential conformance-judgment methodology for standards certification of greenhouse integrated controllers
JoonYong Kim1*
1Research Institute of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Republic of Korea
*Corresponding Author
30 June 2026. pp. 172-183
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Abstract

A greenhouse integrated controller is the gateway device that mediates, under the Korean Standards KS B 7958/KS X 3267/3288, between farm management software and the field sensors, actuators, and sub-nodes. Certifying that such a controller conforms to these standards traditionally requires a physical test bed of real devices and RS485 buses, which is costly to assemble, hard to reproduce between test rounds, and ill-suited to injecting the faults a certification body must exercise. A further difficulty is that the configuration a controller reports upward need not match the devices actually installed in the field, and this mismatch is itself a subject of the test. We present a virtualized device-under-test (DUT)-in-the-loop test harness that keeps only the controller as real hardware and reproduces the entire field topology on a commodity computer. The harness splits into two agents: a Northbound agent that observes and commands the DUT over Modbus exactly as farm management software would, and a Southbound agent that simulates the field devices and therefore holds the ground truth. Building on this separation, we define a differential conformance-judgment methodology, where “differential” means that each verdict compares the DUT’s report against the simulated field truth, rather than checking the DUT’s outputs only for internal self-consistency. Control authority over a device is observed on up to six axes (three reported by the gateway, three from nodes as ground truth), and verdicts are rendered for command acceptance, mirroring accuracy, and sensor/actuator readings, with traceability from each verdict down to the captured Modbus frames. Evaluated on three commercial controllers across gateway and flat multi-node topologies, the methodology surfaces defects that internal self-consistency cannot resolve: it distinguishes a genuine defect from a standard-conformant rejection, and exposes a controller that reports a command as applied while its view of the field has gone stale.

Keywords
Conformance testing
Control authority
Differential oracle
Greenhouse integrated controller
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Information
  • Publisher :Korean Society of Precision Agriculture
  • Publisher(Ko) :한국정밀농업학회
  • Journal Title :Precision Agriculture Science and Technology
  • Journal Title(Ko) :정밀농업과학기술
  • Volume : 8
  • No :2
  • Pages :172-183
  • Received Date : 2026-06-12
  • Revised Date : 2026-06-27
  • Accepted Date : 2026-06-29
  • DOI :https://doi.org/10.22765/pastj.20260014
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